Language and Mutual-understanding

No culture or tradition could stay in its original state, and it is even true in speaking of our own languages.  As Jacques Derrida’s description of the acts of literature and acts of religion, translation is also an act between different languages because of its formalizing and internalizing our mutual-understanding into a new set of discourse.  And hermeneutically, in terms of Paul Ricoeur, "discourse is an event of language". 

Never take it just as a kind of dialectic language game of the deconstructive "hermeneutic mafia", because there have been exactly the same resources in Chinese classics.  For instance, when Derrida’s "Comment ne pas parler" seems to be impossibly translated into accurate English , we may find lots of similar expressions in the writings of Chuang Tzu, something like大辩不言 . 

The typical case of such an inter-interpretation of different cultures in the act of translation could be traced back to a priest of London Missionary Society James Legge (1814-1897), especially in his translation of Tao.  His deep understanding of Chinese classics in comparison with Christian scriptures made him believe that “the best way of dealing with it in translating is to transfer it to the version, instead of trying to introduce an English equivalent for it”.   Such insight promotes a re-interpretation or over-interpretation of Tao in a comparative reading of God, but surprisingly, it not only contributes to the Chinese translation of “In the beginning there’s Word” in Delegates Version of the Bible, but also leaves an appropriate interpretation of Tao Te Ching itself, even much better than the translation by a famous contemporary Chinese translator.

This might be further approved by T. S. Eliot’s poem The Rock.  Of course there is a large space diachronically and synchronically between China and the West. Anyway, Socrates' "I know my own ignorance" and the distinction of "the words and the Word" by Karl Barth could be better understood in Chinese merely with the multilingual concern of James Legge and T. S. Eliot.

Language makes us different from one another, but it is also the inter-act of languages that makes it possible for us to enrich our own language and our mutual-understanding.